HOT:, The Original Peter Pan, Created By J.M. Barrie, Is Now In Public Domain

The original Peter Pan, created by J.M. Barrie, is now in public domain.

That means people can creatively reuse only the Mickey Mouse from ‘Steamboat Willie.’ Not the Mickey Mouse in the 1940 movie ‘Fantasia’. Nor the one on ‘Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,’ a kids’ show that aired on the Disney Channel for a decade starting in 2006.

New versions of Mickey Mouse remain under copyright. Copyright applies to creative characters, movies, books, plays, songs and more. And as it happens, Mickey Mouse is also trademarked.

First trailer for ‘INFESTATION 88’, a new co-op horror game where players are hunted by the original Mickey Mouse.

“And of course, trademark law has no end,” adds Harvard Law School professor Ruth Okediji. Disney and other corporations, she says, use trademarks to extend control over intellectual property.” As long as the mark remains distinctive in the supply of goods and services, the owner of the trademark gets to protect that trademark.”

Books by authors W.E.B. Du Bois, Agatha Christie, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Robert Frost will now be public domain, among thousands of others. The list includes films “Lights of New York” and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Circus.”

Musical compositions available include Broadway songs, jazz standards, early blues and pop music such as Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love).”

Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without the creator granting permission or costing money.

The works were first set to be in the U.S. public domain in 1984, but their term as copyrighted materials was extended until 2004. They then were supposed to go into the public domain, but Congress added another 20-year pause and extended these works’ copyright term to 95 years, according to the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

This year, sound recordings from 1923 will also be available under public domain. The Music Modernization Act passed in 2022 released decades of sound recordings, but no more were released last year, the center noted.